You were expecting something not shit. Well, tough.

So anyway. I've a couple friends who're in love with climbing. Like, the-cliffs-may-have-filed-restraining-orders in love with climbing. Every spare moment they have is devoted to getting up to places that people only ever visit if they’re contemplating suicide, and doing so via routes that people only attempt if they’re contemplating suicide and just really want to spite their arms and legs along the way.

Occasionally I’ve been known to tag along to the training centres, although I've never really got into it. I mean, you go up and down a big piece of wood. Yay me.

Until yesterday, that is, when I began to suspect that there was more to this sport than meets the eye. I had tagged along to a centre that specializes in ‘Bouldering’ – this is basically climbing without using any ropes, a technique practiced by people who know what they want out of life, and what they want out of life is to make it as clear as possible that they’re completely off their fucking gourd – and after watching a few of the hard-core climbers tackle the walls, I think I’ve figured out why people see so much attraction to it.

It’s like this, folks: people who do climbing are trained in the secrets of special magic fairy powers. They are actually magicians.

I’ll explain.

There is a climbing frame in this training centre that’s built to resemble a cave. In this cave there was a man climbing. In order to fully illustrate what this man was doing at the precise point that I happened to look in his direction, I would ask you to lend me, for just one moment, your capacities for imagination.

Imagine a man sitting on a toilet. Bear with me, I’m not just being, like, a perv or anything. Scouts Honour here.

Anyway. He’s sitting on a toilet. He’s fully dressed and everything, so I don’t know why he’d be on the John, but he just is. Maybe he’s trying to avoid his cunt of a wife or something. So he’s sitting on the toilet, one elbow on his knee, swinging his legs back and forth absently because the bog we’re talking about here is astonishingly tall. He was wearing an expensive gold watch, only just before you starting peeping on him, you sick also-perverts you (not that I am, as I established above), he dropped it down the pan, and he had to shoot the other hand down between his legs to catch the thing. Imagine him frozen in that position, elbow-deep in toilet bowl.

Got that image? Good.

Now imagine that instead of a watch, he's grabbing a handhold, and instead being on a toilet, he's hanging off the fucking ceiling.

Seriously. Dude’s just hanging upside down one-armed, scratching his nose and looking for all the world like he wished he brought a newspaper in with him.

People, this is not normal human endeavor. People do not simply dangle from ceilings as a regular occurrence, and I am quite sure it is beyond the scope of anything anyone is able to do without some form of assistance from the otherworld. I have read science books, I know these things.

There is magic afoot here. And once you realize this, you see the evidence everywhere. The strange arcane words they yell to each other in their gravity-defying rituals (“Abalakov! Grigri! Reverso! Arête!”). Their desire to seek out the most remote and inhospitable areas they can find, so they can plan their nefarious rituals in peace. The strange ropes and harnesses that can support a man’s body weight despite being thinner than the average shoelace (they carry hooks around, readers. The Egyptians used hooks in Mummy-making. Think on that.). You think the average climber looks buff and manly by accident? He does it to attract sacrifices for his gods! I’m onto something big here, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay, fine. You don’t believe me. A bloke dangling from the ceiling, he’s not magical, he’s just very fit, it’s perfectly possible, la la la, I am a cock, etc. Okay.

I’m not done yet.

So. Ceiling dude’s dangling there, thinking whatever thoughts upside-down people do, when a mate of his decides to come up and join him. This guy walks up to the nearest wall and just goes up the thing without even slowing pace. You’d think the ceiling would provide some sort of inconvenience, but no – he just grabs hold of bits of the roof that I’m quite sure even moss couldn’t cling to and carries on like nothing. It’s like he’s Spider-Man or something.

Now, ceiling crawling is pretty awesome by any standards, but merely defying fucking gravity isn’t the reason I want you to believe that there is magic in these proceedings (even though, y’know, there OBVIOUSLY IS.) The reason I want to give lies in the manner in which this guy managed to get across the ceiling.

Now when you’re walking along a normal, right-way-round surface, you accomplish this by having your feet bear most of your weight, as many of you will have no doubt noticed. And as many of you have also no doubt noticed, or can at least surmise, it is hard to make your feet bear your weight on a surface when the surface in question is in an alignment oppositional to local conditions of gravity. In order to accomplish this, therefore, you have to scout out any cracks or hooks in the ceiling and then mash your hands and feet into them as if each one is a co-worker’s face.

Among other skills, this requires considerable flexibility, and our boy Roof-Crawler’s flexibility was, to this ceiling, what a full battalion of tanks is to rabbit-hunting. He was wedging his feet into gaps that were next to his ears. He was wedging his feet, in fact, into gaps that were next to the opposite ear from the leg he was using. I kid you not.

This, ladies and gentlemen of my nonexistent audience, is the reason I offer for the existence of magic powers in the Climbing fraternity. With flexibility like that, this man can give himself blow jobs.

No, really, hear me out. It is a well-established fact that once a man has acquired access to blow jobs whenever he wants them, howsoever this may be, then there is nothing in life that is worth doing any more. And yet, despite having achieved a level of bodily mastery that gives him access to this most prized of Cornucopias, this man keeps coming back to do more climbing. Therefore, climbing must bestow upon its participants something that is even more awesome than infinite blow jobs. What else is there?

Magic Powers, people. Reality-bending magic powers.

QED.

As is required for all kinds of sports and hobbies in this day and age, I present the Mandatory List of Amusing Climbing Terminology, which I absolutely did not find while browsing Wikipedia looking for big words for this article:

• Alpine Cock Ring

• Munter hitch

• Brown point

• Crack climbing (a style of climbing simply defined as “wedging body parts into cracks”.)

• Fist jam

• Nut Key

• Sloppy Plopping

• Teabagging.

So in conclusion: climbers got there first, Counterstrikers.

Look! Big words in white text!

Right, so I was supposed to bring back two kills from the update hunt to make up for yesterday's sad catch, and it looks like I'm facing the prospect of returning to the blog campfire once again a sad breaker of my word, telling morose tales of how I saw this really really BIG one hiding in the bushes but then a tiger ate it. Then I thought, no. I can get out of this. I WILL find something I can write about, by the Gods!

And I did.

So, then, I present you with the definitive list of WHY UPDATES ARE SUCH A BASTARD TO KEEP UP WITH.

1) I'm a lazy cunt.

Well, that was entertaining. I'm off to bed.

Pff.

So I spent the day at work. I'm a data entry clerk. There is nothing about this situation that screams 'stellar comedy material'. I imagine an article on the fun ins and outs of reconciling account receipts would make the average audience want to punch me, and I haven't even got an audience.

Anyway, I'm going to talk about a customer of the tax department. Let's call him Cunt. Cunt does not pay his tax. Cunt has not paid his tax for several years, actually, because he is apparently in dire financial straits, what with barely having the money for his first-class ticket to Rome for the second time this year.

Okay, fair play. If you want to give the finger to the bailiffs I'm not going to stop you. If you want to ignore the department phone calls, I really don't mind - I don't even work for the tax department, I just sit in the same office as them because the Government hasn't got any money any more and they can't afford such luxuries as enough walls and floors for everyone. And if, when you finally do answer the phone, you want to tell the tax man that you WILL not pay and do not HAVE to pay, go right ahead.

But for fuck's sake, you're crossing some kind of stupid threshold when you actually take the time to phone THEM to tell them all this. It's like you've woken up to find an alligator in a half-doze right next to your crotch so you decide the best course of action is to smack it in the face with a stick. Although in this case it's the sort of alligator that sends you annoyed-sounding letters instead of ripping your arm off. And then sends Bailiffs that take your stuff. And then sends you to prison.

Anyway. I must take a moment to point out that I do not deal with Cunt in any way, shape, or form. I have never met him, never spoken to him, never even seen him.

I must take another moment to reiterate that I don't do Government stuff, and also to point out that this office is fairly big. It takes a good ten seconds to cross from on end to the other at a brisk pace. The people who deal with Cunt sit at the other end of this Clerical expanse, far too far for me to eavesdrop. And God forbid I ever try to do anything like make conversation with my co-workers.

How, then, I know you are wondering with baited breath, do I know the fine details about Cunt?

Simple. Because despite all that - despite that it's not my department, despite that he's on the other end of a phone on the other end of the office - I CAN STILL FUCKING HEAR HIM.

Seriously. Cunt doesn't sound like he's ringing up about tax, he sounds like he was a leading contestant on "World's Noisiest Fucker" and got told in the middle of the proceedings that a tax man murdered his children. The people who deal with him have to hold the phone like a foot from their ear just to avoid having tinnitus for the rest of the day. I know there are people out there who believe that the Government is putting sedatives in the water supply, but having heard some of these phone calls I can assure you that a) they're not and b) they fucking should be.

Bollocks, arse, other miscelleny

Welp. Another day, another missed update. I'm fucking good at this. 

I buy all mine online anyway

So Hull smells of burnt chocolate and pies. And shit. Mostly of shit, really. The smell doesn’t really hit you when you walk out of the station so much as it sneaks into your nose by jimmying a window, and then your sinuses wake up just in time to get their heads caved in with a vase. Of course if you're visiting at night-time then there are many things that will probably hit you as you walk out of the station, such as a chav’s fist or his baseball bat.

Okay, yes, that’s an unfair generalisation of Hull, I admit it, and I’ve no right to go saying things like that about the train station when the only time I was ever beaten up by chavs was outside the university.

Anyway.

There’s another thing that might hit you as you walk out of the train station, too. You’ve just arrived; you step out to your first glimpse of Hull; you run your eye along the shops ranged opposite, and bam – Sex Toy shop.

Okay. So there's really nothing untoward about that, in honesty. We're moving forward as a society, and it's great that we've reached a point where you can have this stuff on display without your children being set on fire. I mean, compared to places like Ibiza, we’re still practically Puritan. I was over there last year and even the big family-friendly supermarkets stock nipple clamps on the same aisle as the fig rolls.

 Browsing in an Ibizan shop. Desk fan, Hot-Dog steamer, Strap-On... hey, they sell stationary!

So as I was saying, purveyor of purple dongs and vibrating rubber tits right outside the train station, ho ho ho, oh those wacky Hullians, come on let’s find the pub. Fair enough. Except that come the end of my visit I hop on the train back to Derby, and I get outside the station and look down the street, and bam. Sex Toy shop. Same franchise, no less.

You know how there's a massive branch of marketing research devoted to arranging your shops in just the right way to ensure the best sales? I mean, some of this stuff you’d never think of until it’s pointed out. Like how nearly every supermarket has its fruit and veg at the front of the store because the bright colours draw attention, and they put the milk at the very back because people need milk all the time and making them walk through the whole store makes it more likely they’ll pick up something else, and they put alcohol near the baby products because new parents have just found out that babies are actually whiny demanding bundles of shit and they need something to numb the pain of having to look after the bloody thing for the next eighteen years.

So if the marketing fobs at SimplyPleasure, for that is who they are, are correct in their findings, then this country’s most pervasive purchasers of penile paraphernalia are the passengers of British Rail.

I don't know about you, but I'm intrigued. I mean, I know that train travel can be a chore, and sometimes after your train gets delayed for the fifth time you feel like you could honestly stab someone in the face, but I’ve never needed to wind down with anything stronger than a cup of tea and an episode of Family Guy. Is there really a significant demographic out there who step off from a 3-train interchange from London to Edinburgh and think to themselves “Buggerin' 'ell, If I don’t get me an Arsequaker 5000 and some lube in the next five minutes I’m gonna EXPLODE!”?

And yet a major retailer of these things apparently thinks yes, there is.

(PS Yes, before any smug bastard points it out, there are probably lots of quite valid reasons why this is so, including but not limited to people visiting their lovers after weeks apart who might pick up something racy for the reunion, businessmen travelling from one lonely hotel-room to another who want something that isn’t a prostitute, and trainspotters. However, shut your face.)

Blartle Wartle

What, so I'm supposed to update twice today then?

Fine.

So I was in Hull for a party last night, and I froze my tits off.

So yeah. That's all I've got.

Fuck you.

Insert Insert Title Here message here

Having sworn to update every day, it’s taken me 0 days to miss my first deadline. Go me. So the following is a day old, not that you care. Or even exist, for that matter.

Anyway. If I pledge to update every day that means I’ve got to find something to write about.

So let's talk about this guy two rows in front of me who is making no secret of chatting up a girl in the row across from him.

This is the first time I’ve heard a guy chat up a girl in public outside of shitty American television American television. I would chalk this up to me being colossal misanthrope who goes out in public about as often as I feel the urge to bludgeon my nuts with a hammer, except that everyone else in the carriage is listening in as if they've never heard this sort of thing before either.

I'm on a train, by the way.

So either I’m not a colossal misanthrope, and this sort of thing really isn't all that uncommon, or the public doesn't get out much either.

There’s no actual point to this. I’m just typing randomly.

Oh, shut up. I know I'm writing shite, but hey, you’re the one still sat here reading it. I’m going to change trains now.

So now having changed trains I find myself in a carriage full of drunk Doncastrian football supporters. This should be fun.

No, seriously, it really is fun. Listening to them trying to string sentences together is very entertaining. I'd say it was the all the booze but I think it's more to do with them being from Doncaster.

Floodedobah-dah dahbedobedobe dobe dobah-bah flahbahlablelablelah.

Arrived in Hull. Cunting cuntbuggery, it's cold.

Oh, fine then, I'll fucking write.

HA HA HA LOOK I STARTED A BLOG, I BET NO-ONE'S EVER DONE THAT BEFORE

HA HA HA LOOK I DID SARCASM ABOUT THE COMMONNESS OF BLOGS, I BET NO-ONE'S EVER DONE THAT BEFORE EITHER

So yeah. I'm soon-to-be unemployed and still living with my parents at 25. Fucking joy. So I've got nothing better to do than sit here and whine about it to a server.

Actually I've got a lot better to do, such as, oh, say, APPLYING FOR FUCKING JOBS. Except that hasn't borne fruit for about two years and I fail to see why it would magically start now.

So anyway. Let's see if I can keep this up for any length of time, like all the other things I am disciplined and structured about. Like porn watching, for example, or staring at walls. I can work on those all day.

Well, I have a program that won't stop playing the tones of a shrieking baby at me until I hit 500 words and I'm currently at 173 as of now. So let's see.

Nah fuck it, I'm off to bed.

So yeah. Blog.

Feh.